benjamin quigg

“Did you forget about me already, Ben?” Elise asks, face drawn up in a mock pout. She breaks into a smile as she steps through the doorway of his office, a stack of papers in tow. Of all of Julian’s staff, Elise likes Benjamin the most. They’ve known each other for a long time– longer than she and Julian, even– and he is the reason they met in the first place. Elise knows she and Julian were destined to be together, one way or another, but all credit goes to Ben for helping speed fate along. He put them in the same room together on the night they met, and, as the saying goes, the rest is history.

“It’s nothing exciting, unfortunately,” she says, holding the papers out at arm’s length for him to take. “It’s my half of the speech for the French-American dinner next week. I figured I’d deliver it myself, since, well– it’s all in French. You might need a translator.”

A smile, albeit a somewhat forced one, spreads across Benjamin’s lips as Elise makes her way into his office, a small pout causing her lip to jut out. It’s not that Benjamin doesn’t enjoy her company, because he truly does, but there really is something about meetings that fall after three o’clock that grate his nerves in just the right way to make him viciously irritated. Still, he’d rather it be her interrupting his time alone than someone else that isn’t nearly as charismatic or as well liked by him. 

“Only slightly,” he replies as he twists in his chair, allowing his feet to fall to the ground before he scoots closer to his desk. “I’m sure you were swimming around somewhere in the back of my brain, so don’t worry too much.” The smile remaining on his lips grows at his comment as he lets out a small chuckle at his own joke.

OPEN STARTER / cbcstarters.

                    The streets of D.C.  were swarming with tourists, and the occasional local, clawing their way through the crowds to catch a glimpse of the woman who’d inspired inexpressible interest and unfathomable vitriol in the 70s as she made the short walk from her limousine to the Four Seasons lobby. As deliberation on the Disarmament Bill roused a similar level of clashing opinions, long - time activist Yoko Ono made the trip to D.C. to advocate on behalf of gun control – harnessing her own husband’s death to stake her claim. iI wasn’t altogether unusual to see a celebrity in the city, though hers was a presence that made waves - and made it near impossible to hail a cab.

Glancing to another victim of the pandemonium, Luka lent a sympathetic look.  ❛  Almost forty years since Lennon’s death, and we’re still splitting hairs over the same argument.  ❜  He pocketed his phone,  eyes narrowing in thinly - veiled annoyance,  ❛ Hell – we’ll be waiting all night at this rate.   ❜  

If there was one thing that was apparent to most people upon meeting Benjamin for the first time, it was that he had little to no patience for anything or anyone, let alone a so-called celebrity who was keeping him from reaching his intended destination on time.

His attention had been focused on his phone throughout the entirety of the time that he had been held up in the mass of people that seemed unable to move even an inch, so much so that he hadn’t noticed a somewhat familiar face looking towards him until they’d begun to spoke. With a quick glance in their direction, Benjamin nodded in agreement before returning his attention back to his phone. 

Hans shrugs, smug. “Which is precisely why this works.”

He watches Ben shift in his chair, leaning forward with expectation. It’s not because I promised, that it’s true. Truthfully, Hans had stopped by with intentions somewhere between talks of the gun bill and personal distraction, two points which bounced off one another with ease around Benjamin Quigg. He was the sort of mystery which infuriated Hans to not have yet figured out; a little like Laura, or Luka, or Sarah Jane — and more than them, he was a mystery with a key connection to the President of the United States. 

“Well, it’s always been business and pleasure, isn’t it?” Hans looks around the room, taking in the new space; he hadn’t been to this side of the White House before. “I was in a meeting down the hall,” he says, starting towards Ben’s desk, “now I’m off to get drink and I thought,” he leans forward also, placing both hands flat on the surface, leveling his face to Ben’s, “Who’s the one person on the floor I can actually stand?” He shrugs, “Laura Bellamy wasn’t available, so here I am.”

He punctuates the quip with another smile. First, pleasure. After a bourbon or two, business. Hans bites down on his lip as though, really, flustered to ask: "You wanna get a drink with me, Benny?“ 

There’s always been something about Hans that’s interested Benjamin, though it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what it is. It’s certainly not his smugness, given that Benjamin has it in spades, and it’s not the flirtatious smirks or the intelligent quips. No, Benjamin’s used to all of that. It’s something deeper, something that Hans manages to keep hidden despite Benjamin’s best efforts to coerce it out of him, and it frustrates Benjamin to no end.

“I’m the second choice?” Benjamin questions, overlooking the comment about a meeting despite being interested in who exactly it was with. His brow remains raised as he feigns surprise at being Hans’s second option. “I don’t know whether I should be flattered or shocked that I wasn’t first.” In all honesty, he’s not bothered by either alternative.

“If I lied and said yes,” Hans starts, half way into the office, “would you at least pretend to believe me?” Cue the smile: the trademark Starke grin, which was sharp, disarmingly charming, and sleazy all around.

He doesn’t wait for a response; instead, Hans takes the final two steps inside, swinging the door closed behind him. “You secretary really likes me,” he says, a little too proud of his ways. “So— no, we didn’t.” Have a meeting, that is. “And yes, Sarah told me,” — about your necessarily inconvenient schedule — “which is why she made me promise it wasn’t for business.”

“Didn’t you know? I spend most of our conversations pretending to believe the things that come out of your mouth,” Benjamin responds with a smile, teeth surprisingly spotless given the amount of coffee he consumes on a daily basis. 

“Seven. No, seven.” Benjamin had been on the phone with his ex-wife for nearly thirty minutes, though the majority of the time had been spent listening to her drawl on about their eldest daughter’s most recent date with a boy, the son of some senator that Benjamin didn’t care to remember the name of, and their youngest’s recent success on an exam in her Introduction to Philosophy course because, of all the things she could have studied, she chose Philosophy. The conversation had taken a recent turn, however, and was now focused on setting up a time for the family to grab dinner together. Given the state of his relationship with his ex-wife one wouldn’t expect Benjamin to freely agree to casual dinner dates with her and the girls present, but his youngest had been begging for months and, for once, he had a decent chunk of time open in his schedule.

“No, I can’t do six. It has to be seven,” he grumbled into the phone as he kicked back in his office chair and dropped both of his feet, one crossed over the other, onto his desk. All of the commotion over the phone paired with Benjamin’s occasional mindlessness and his slowly diminishing hearing caused him to miss the first knock at his door.

“Seven, Marg—yeah, come in!” he called out, finally hearing the second round of knocking just as he’d begun to raise his voice to his wife. “I have to go, Margot, I’ll call you back.” And with a quick tap of his thumb, she was silenced.

+ benjamin quigg // personality development